The Importance Of Snapchat On The Media

For decades now, society has constructed the idea that it is the parent 's responsibility to protect their children from danger and harm. However, parents trying to maintain this protection over children is not so simple when technology gets involved. Americans have suspected that accessibility and content that 's provided by media platforms scare existing social structures between the relationship of parent and child, especially for teenager. Media accessibility and the explicit content on the media platform only became moral panics when used to hurt social structures already in place. In America, teenagers use media platforms to express identity, but do so in a way that parents are fearful what is being constructed and received. There is…show more content…A survey at the University of Washington examined 127 active and inactive users. The users who did not use snapchat was because there are “concerns related to sensitive content, including that Snapchat ‘has a bad reputation (for sexting),’ that it ‘seems useful for only inappropriate content,’ and that ‘there are additional connotations that go along with this particular app.’” (pg. 9) This association to Snapchat is not just a concern, but the truth. According to a study conducted in 2010, “1 and 5 teenagers have reported having sent or posted a nude” (business insider, dickey) photo. It becomes harmful to society because it has a corrupting effect upon the child. “A teenager who chooses to send sexually explicit images to a peer is engaging in a very different activity than someone who distributes a private image with malicious intent or coerces another person to produce an explicit image” That being said, I do not intend to argue that the sexting is necessarily good or bad to society, or even about the mobile technology sexting is used on; rather I seek to argue the panics around sexting result from societal uncertainties, the way in which sexting is both produced and received, right in the palm of children’s hand through a mobile device. This availability of explicit content sent and received to children’s mobile phones on apps such as Snapchat is a fear for parents, and makes it harder for parents to not only protect children, but harder to maintain the same parent child relationship as it was during the post World War II

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